"People who claim to be non-religious are usually engaged in a personal struggle with certain specific historically known forms of organized religion..."

Durn...there it is again, Little Hawk. You have said essentially this for years now, and I keep trying to explain that you are becoming the Poster Boy for equivocation.

I KNOW what you are getting at, but you distort (perhaps 'water down' is a better phrase) the idea of 'religious' by attempting to subsume all 'personal' viewpoints under the term.

No matter what you insist on calling it, what some people do in their thinking and analysis is fundamentally different from others. There are those who arrive at their beliefs from authority, superstition, guesswork, popular culture, peer pressure and flat-out imagination......and there **ARE** others who pursue a rigorous form of analysis of issues by asking what the basic premises are for a position, what can be demonstrated, what is testable, what is truly logical and what can be eliminated by certain tests.

This is 'roughly' what the scientific method is....and although those who try to USE the scientific method can, and do, make mistakes, the concept is that mistakes will be gradually overcome and we will gradually get closer to reality & truth, with no requirement that we actually achieve 'absolute' truth and knowlege.

....and for those who state that "science is not designed to deal with the metaphysical realms", and thus we can't disprove such claims--- they are presuming that there are in fact these metaphysical realms and that ANYTHING substantial can be said about them. ....well, they are partially correct- one thing that can be said about them is that they ARE unproven and based on hearsay and conjecture. This very fact makes them subject to different treatment and rules. God and ghosts and devils and fairies are thus in the same basic category....all of them 'might' be true, real and important...and all of them might not be!
   And it is important that we not write laws that assume the fairies in our gardens must be taken into account in zoning laws....or that God must be given His share of tax revenues!....but if an individual wants to build a haven for fairies in his garden, or devote a portion of his income to his church, he should be free to do so....as long as his neighbor, the scientist, is not affected.

...so....that's the best I can do. I am relatively sure various folks will come along and RE-insert slippery locutions and concepts with unproven assumptions buried in them, but at least I tried...